Functional languages
have been under academic development for over 25 years, and are still
proving to be very fertile ground for programming language
research. Consequently, most of the development focus of these
languages is driven by academic and theoretical questions. More
recently, however, functional languages have been very successfully
used in commercial, industrial, and government settings, where their
advantages have been able to be leveraged
dramatically.

The goal of CUFP is
to act as a voice for commercial users of functional programming
languages and technology. It
aims to help functional programming become increasingly viable as a
technology for use in the commercial, industrial, and government
space, by providing a forum for FP professionals to share their
experiences and ideas,
whether business, management
or engineering. It also
aims to enable the formation and cementing of relationships and
alliances that further the
commercial use of functional languages. Providing user feedback to
language designers and implementers is not a primary goal of the
workshop, though it will be welcome if it
occurs.

Program plans

The meeting lasted a
full day, with a mix of invited and submitted presentations, plus
discussion sessions.

Topics ranged over a wide
area, including:

Case studies both of successful and unsuccessful
uses of functional programming;

Business opportunities and risks from using
functional languages;

Enablers for functional language use in a
commercial setting;

Barriers to the adoption of
functional languages;

Mitigation strategies for overcoming limitations
of FP;

There will be no
published proceedings, as the meeting was intended to be more a
discussion forum than a technical interchange. A
full report of the workshop appeared in the
Functional Programming column of the December 2004 issue of SIGPLAN
Notices.

The
final schedule includes one extra
impromptu talk. Speakers slides will be added as them become
available.